Ricoh smartens up sales with ActiveDocs Opus

July 23, 2009:Ricoh New Zealand is the launchpad for the company's global adoption of automated document creation technology from ActiveDocs Opus, used for generation of Sales Proposals, RFP Responses, and other sales correspondence.

ActiveDocs Opus is a Document Automation Solution built on Microsoft Office and Windows Server technology, that supports industry standard integration with data sources and document storage and handling applications.

Amanda Sharp, ActiveDocs Director of Client Services, said: “The ActiveDocs Services team has assisted Ricoh to upgrade from ActiveDocs Enterprise to ActiveDocs Opus, which in turn has enabled Ricoh to leverage advanced Document Automation features to create a leading-edge Sales Proposal generation capability fully integrated with their sales processes and product databases.

"The powerful content sharing and re-use capabilities of ActiveDocs Opus allows Ricoh’s investment in the Sales Proposal tool to be extended into the creation of RFP Responses and a range of other documents throughout the sales cycle.”

Ricoh has implemented ActiveDocs Opus in User Driven mode to enable Sales Teams to easily and efficiently create precise, accurate Sales Proposals using dynamic, up-to-date product data from sophisticated back-end databases, all achieved through the simple browser-basedActiveDocs Opus Document Wizard. The solution also takes advantage of ActiveDocs Opus’ image handling capabilities to produce elegantly illustrated sales documents.

The initial implementation, at Ricoh NZ, has been optimally designed to leverage the content sharing and re-use capabilities of ActiveDocs Opus, to enable consistent branding and presentation and maximum reuse of content in the creation of Sales Proposals, RFP Responses and other sales correspondence.

Re-use is achieved through ActiveDocs Opus Snippet technology which allows the sharing of common content – not only between web based Templates, but also on the desktop within Microsoft Office Applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint via the Office Research Pane.ActiveDocs Opus Snippets can include both static and dynamic content, and may be protected or editable in both the browser and desktop environments.

The reporting capabilities of ActiveDocs Opus will allow Ricoh Sales Managers to track sales document generation by a wide range of parameters including date, time, area, customer, salesperson, document volumes, and even internal document properties which can include custom properties such as Proposal Values and other dynamic variables.